Elegy for the Oakland A’s

…no one wants to hear from the murderer at the funeral…

Sportswriter Ann Killion, on owner John Fisher’s sham letter of regret.

Sports is not really about demigods performing super human feats, even if it sometimes is. It’s not about honoring divine beings, extolling the virtues of gentlemen athletes, or bringing about world peace, even if some claimed that was its purpose. Sports is not even about winning. Sports is about storytelling, stories which become inseparably woven into the fabric of our own lives.

There have been a lot of tears shed this past week at the funeral for the Oakland Athletics, my hometown baseball team. The final games were played last week by Oakland’s quirky, over-achieving players in its aging, industrial monolith of a stadium. Fans and players wept openly, and we’re still crying. I went to a lot of games there, by myself and with friends, wife, kids, in-laws. The A’s Bay Area tenure roughly paralleled mine, and, although I’m not going anywhere, they’re headed off to West Sacramento, to wear jerseys that have no place name on them. The team owners are dreaming of going to Vegas, but all they have so far is an architectural drawing and a hope for public funding.

I was going to write a rant, full of fury at A’s owner John Fisher, who publicly throttled this team as we were all suffered to watch. Like many of the other fans, though, I end up just thinking about my long string of experiences. Forgive me for such a long, maudlin post. Like a good wake, it goes on longer than it should because I just don’t want to tell the deceased goodbye.

The Oakland A’s have always had to play things a little differently, under weird circumstances and not always with poise or polish. They took pride in eccentricity and in showing up to contend with those who had more to begin with.

The Upstarts, the Brash, and BillyBall

I grew up a baseball fan. When I was seven, my Detroit Tigers won the World Series, and my brother and I went out on the front porch and banged pots and pans. My dad, a lifelong Tigers fan and sports enthusiast, was over the moon. A few years later, we crowded around the TV when the 1971 All Star Game came to Detroit. I still remember this muscular young Black player in a neon-colored uniform blasting a home run so hard and fast that the camera lost it. It hit a light transformer on the high roof of Tiger Stadium and bounced away down Michigan Avenue, never to be found. Who was this Reggie Jackson guy?

I moved to Sacramento in the summer of ’72, when my beloved Ti-cats were trying for one last gasp with the same aging players from the summer of ’68. Technically, the Oakland Athletics were my new “home” team in Sacramento, which was way too small to have a team of their own, but I resented the A’s. They brushed my Tigers aside on their way to three World Series wins. It took me a long time to get over it. Of course, having your sporting dreams crushed is an integral part of being a fan. It’s not about winning; it’s about hope.

Those brash A’s in their tacky green uniforms lacked dignity. They wore mustaches and long hair. Reggie Jackson had a big mouth. Jackson stole home to beat my Tigers and win the 1972 American League pennant, so I hated Reggie Jackson. When he was traded to the Yankees, I was so happy, then he had even more success, helping them win the World Series and earning the nickname “Mr. October.” It irked me when he decided to have his uniform retired as a Yankee. I didn’t know then that the Athletics owner, Charlie Finley, had tried to screw him over and that his pugnacious attitude was partly a response to the tidal waves of racism that he had to content with. Much later on, I acquired two Reggie Jackson bobble-heads in an A’s fan giveaway, and I got good money for them off eBay.

I warmed up to the A’s around 1980, while I was attending Berkeley. How could I not, when I loved baseball? The A’s were always local to those in the East Bay, the Giants far off somewhere in park everyone hated that was hard to get to. In my first game at the Oakland Coliseum, April 18, 1981, I sat right behind home plate. I watched the A’s set a record for most consecutive games won to open the season (a record since broken). I was smitten, at least by the aggressive style of Oakland’s play and the fun of going to a stadium again. Seats were cheap, hot dogs had sauerkraut, and the BART train went practically right to the stadium’s entrance.

The 1980 A’s were rebuilding and reviving. Finley, their penny-pinching owner, had soured on the rising salaries of new free agency, and attendance plummeted after he auctioned off his former champions. Other major league owners in 1979 were already–only a decade after allowing the Athletics to move from Kansas City to Oakland–grousing about Oakland’s poor revenue opportunities, muttering that the team needed to move again. They didn’t like the fickle Oakland fans (any more than the long hair or the brash talk). Maybe MLB owners have been Oakland’s real nemesis all along.

But Finley hired a New York circus act to breathe new life and revenue into the team. That act’s name was Billy Martin, a World Series winning Yankee player and manager who had just been fired (again) for fighting with a marshmallow salesman in the off-season. Martin’s fire-breathing brand of Billyball began with the talented young Rickey Henderson, who stole bases with fury and enthusiasm. Rickey rather quickly broke the single season record for steals, on his way to breaking several other records. For a while, everyone in Oakland hustled rather than relying on a home run trot. Billyball pumped up the team’s value enough for Finley to sell to the Haas family, of the Levi-Strauss empire, and the team’s fortunes improved.

In the fifty-year history of the Oakland team, the Haas tenure was relatively short, at only 13 years, but it set the gold standard for how to manage a sports business. The Levi’s business was built on a quality product, and the Haas management invested with a plan to deliver a solid team that fans would pay to see. That included the experience away from the park with better merchandise and good announcers. For the 1981 season, the A’s management scored a coup with the broadcasting team of Bill King and Lon Simmons. I started listening to baseball on the radio like I had as a kid in Detroit, and I rarely missed a game in the early 1980s.

Under New Management

To my mind, the Bill King, Lon Simmons, and Ray Fosse trio still may be the best to ever call the games. Simmons and King were already Bay Area sports royalty, with long histories on radio calling games for Cal, the Giants, Warriors, Raiders and 49ers. Lon Simmons had a voice like liquid gold; he could make a pitch count sound majestic. Bill King was a legend, too, and applied a unique personality and extensive vocabulary. He looked like Mephistopheles; he loved wine, ballet, and sailing. The Bay Area has a big tent, and is full of all sorts of–as Sam Jackson might say–erudite motherf– in it. Bill King had the combination of sports knowledge and turn of phrase perfect for an English major.

I also went to the Coliseum plenty when I lived in Berkeley and later Oakland in the 1980s. As my dad had shown me in downtown Detroit, I knew how to find free parking spots near the stadium. It was a little dicey, sure, but I grew up in the city. Never had a problem, but then I’ve never owned a car that looked worth breaking into. Plus, I could usually park in the BART lot for free for a weekend game or even just take the train; easy in, easy out. You could pick up an A’s cap any color for five bucks from the hawkers on the bridgeway.

The great pitching staff under Billy Martin’s tutelage eventually threw their arms out. Martin would brag that they’d pitch long into games, and when I told that to my dad, he said, watch how long they last. None of them did. Martin got fired again and by the late 1980s, a young fellow named Tony La Russa came in to experiment with this newfangled idea of a closer. Take someone whose career as a starter had fizzled and repurpose them, say Dennis Eckersley. The 1988 A’s had young muscles again, Canseco and McGwire, and a pitching ace, Dave Stewart. My wife and I teasingly referred to Stew as the pitching castrato because of his high voice, but he was a dynamite pitcher and was especially good at one thing: beating the Red Sox, who were tops in the East at the time.

The 1988 team soared with confidence into the World Series, against the Dodgers. My wife and I were returning from a cruise to Mexico, hoping to watch most of the Series at home after vacation. The flight left late, so we were bummed to miss most of the first game. But the pilot announced mid-game when Canseco hit a three-run homer, so we knew the A’s were ahead going into the bottom of the ninth, as we came down the jetway into the Oakland Airport. Even after nine hours of traveling, we had to stop and watch, through a crowd of shoulders at an airport bar.

It’s considered one of the great moments in baseball, though not for me. Dennis Eckersley loads the bases. Who steps up to the plate by ex-Detroit Tiger Kirk Gibson, one of my dad’s favorite players, a World Series leftover from 1984. By 1988, Gibson in Los Angeles was old and broken down, limping up to the plate, a joke. His legendary grand slam in the game–over my team, while wearing a Dodgers uniform–is considered a sports triumph. That motorscooter! A newfound reason to hate the Dodgers, which is de rigeur for people in the Bay Area, even American League fans. Don’t ever say the name of the Dodger’s manager Tommy La—— in front of my wife. She’ll launch a frying pan at your head. She’s still even more pissed than I am.

Rocking and a Rollin’

Every A’s and Giant’s fan knows where they were at 5:04 pm on October 17, 1989. It was Game Three of that rare match-up, local teams competing for the big prize. I was in a Thrifty drug store, about three blocks from my apartment in Berkeley, contemplating a box of Oreos. I had rushed home from work early to watch. The cookies started jumping off the shelves. I looked for cover as these giant fluorescent lights above started to swing, and somebody screamed, but then the earthquake was over. Phew! I walked home without buying anything, but it turned out the quake was not small and local. Loma Prieta turned out to be a 6.9 big and deadly. Part of a freeway collapsed though with far people because because many had already gone home for the game. Little else about that World Series is memorable. The A’s won, but neither team’s heart was in playing.

The A’s lost the World Series next year, even after dominating all season. Overconfident? They had the personnel but would forever after have trouble sealing the deal. Even as late as 1992, they remained playoff contenders with the Bash Brothers, good pitching, and good managing. Rickey Henderson returned and broke the lifetime stolen base record. But there was still churn. I was at the game on August 31 when Canseco, the home run star, was called back from the on-deck circle and subbed out. Some minutes later, one of the fans in a nearby row yelled, “Holy sh!t, they’ve traded Canseco!” We got Ruben Sierra from Texas for the deal and some better pitching. Canseco became infamous as a Ranger by losing track of a ball in left field as it bounced off his head and over the fence for a home run.

A friend at work got me a ticket to one of the American League pennant games. I sat in Section 202, back of the left field bleachers, on the other side of the foul pole. You needed a telescope to see the field. But I knew every time Rickey got on base, which was every time he came to bat. He’d be on first, then, quickly you’d see the blur, as the pitcher and shortstop flailed around trying something about this guy. Eventually a throw would go into center field. Rickey just kept running and giving the Toronto pitchers fits. I thought that was 1992, but the Internet tells me it was the 1989 series. Who cares about the year? I remember seeing it, whenever it was.

The 1992 Presidential debates between Clinton, Bush, and Ross Perot were televised opposite Game 4 of the AL series between Oakland and Toronto. It seemed like Oakland might finally break through, with their cleverly-timed trades and Henderson, but as I flipped back and forth between the debates, this pivotal game went to extra innings. (DVRs hadn’t been invented yet). It became another Eckersley debacle, as he gave up the lead. The A’s lost the game, though Slick Willie and the Democrats finally took back the White House. It worked out in the end at least for the 1990s.

All of these memories are a part of it. The Athletics only won one World Series during all those years that I listened, watched, and cheered at so many games. It was always about the experience.

They Can’t Take What I Can Remember

At one point, I went to a double-header with my wife and dad that had a long rain delay in the 7th inning of the first game. Eventually, the A’s won after the delay but game lost the second, and we were soaked and exhausted by the time we trundled home, twelve hours later. Never wait out a rain delay in a double header! Another time, I was playing with my kids at their grandma’s house when Derek Jeter threw out Jeremy Giambi, bombing for home in an AL playoff against the Yankees. Visiting my brother in Seattle, I watched Dallas Braden’s perfect game. The memories stack up.

By the 2000s, the A’s kept trading away their best players. They would bring up talent from their farm team but never keep them–Jason Giambi, Eric Chavez, Matt Chapman, Sean Manaea, Scott Brosius, Jermaine Dye. The Haas family era had ended, and “Moneyball” was in play. Which was fine in theory; you can be a little cheap and mount a winning team. But it’s irksome to go down a list of MVPs of World Series and playoffs and see so many who were former Oakland players. I came to embrace the cross-town Giants who I’d previously disdained. It seemed pretty clear that the Oakland owners no longer cared about baseball itself. When the team was sold to a real estate developer in 2005, though, it was the beginning of the end.

Still, even after I stopped being a big A’s fan, I took my kids to the Coliseum, with friends and through school and summer field trips. We had stacks of hats and blankets and bobble-heads at one point. For some reason, when my visiting son and his wife went to the Coliseum last month to catch a game–I inexplicably had a conflict–they couldn’t find any hats. (There were three in the bin, folks.) But I did beam with pride when my son told me he found free parking in the BART lot. Chip off the old block! My new daughter-in-law is a lifelong Padres fan. We share the hatred for the Dodgers, so she’s all right by me!

The thing about that ugly, cold Coliseum was that it was easy to get to and still somewhat affordable, even when the owners jacked up ticket prices and shut off the third deck. The Coliseum was where camps in the East Bay would take the hordes of kids; the San Francisco stadium might be better but was still too far away. The Coliseum was accessible in so many ways. Now, even that’s been taken.

Sportswriters this week have tut-tutted and claimed it’s all about money. That’s not really it. Professional sports has always been about money, a fact well known by the fans who pay for the tickets, the hot dogs, the hats, and the bobble-heads. Fans put up with a lot of abuse from fickle and greedy owners, but the tacit agreement is that the owners want to own a baseball team. The hardest part has been to watch this particular set of owners slowly bleed the team dry, dangling the idea of staying while never negotiating in good faith, refusing to sell, and treating the players, support staff, announcers, and the fans with contempt.

The amazing thing is that the players and the management staff have tried to be professional for this long with a noose around their neck. Mark Kotsay, the 2024 manager of this team of doom, made a beautiful speech on the last day. It was rumored that the owners expected riots and told the players and managers not to say anything in public. Instead of riots, the fans packed the stadium, cheering and crying along with the players, who stood around the field soaking up the last moments. We’re still fans; yesterday, an enterprising hacker substituted Oakland’s name in the playoff bracket for Atlanta’s, until the ESPN data administrator shut that down–this was real, I was looking at the actual playoff schedule.

What happened in Oakland is not just that the owners got greedy, but that they opted to kill the green and golden goose to look for the gold inside. Not just once, but every year and every day for the past dozen summers, they have chopped up the bird, never realizing that the gold was was in the feathers, the memories that floated away.